Freeman was always at his best when in the field. It was then that the full force of his personality came into play: his sturdy upright figure, sharp-cut features, flowing beard, well-modulated voice, clear enunciation, and fluent and incisive speech. None who have heard him hold forth from the steps of some churchyard cross, or from the top stone of some half-demolished cromlech, can ever cease to have a vivid recollection of both the orator and his theme. Freeman took endless pains to master the topography of any place he had to deal with. When at work in his later years on Sicilian history he visited, and he has minutely described, the site of nearly every spot in that island where a battle or a siege took place in ancient times, so that his volumes have become an elaborate historical guide-book for the student or tourist. But while he thus delighted in whatever bore upon history as he conceived it, his conception was one which belonged to the eighteenth century rather than to our own time. It was to him not only primarily but almost exclusively a record of political events--that is to say, of events in the sphere of war, diplomacy, and government. He expressed this view with concise vigour in the well-known dictum, "History is past politics, and politics is present history"; and though his friends remonstrated with him against this view as far too narrow, excluding from the sphere of history many of its deepest sources of interest, he would never give way. That historians should care as much (or more) for the religious or philosophical opinions of an age, or for its ethical and social phenomena, or for the study of its economic conditions, as for forms of government or battles and sieges, seemed to him strange. He did not argue against the friends who differed from him, for he was ready to believe that there must be something true and valuable in the views of a man whom he respected; but he could not be induced to devote his own labours to the elucidation of these matters. He would say to Green, "You may bring in all that social and religious kind of thing, Johnny, but I can't." So when he went to deliver lectures in the United States, he delighted in making new acquaintances there, and was interested in the Federal system and in all institutions which he could trace to their English originals, but did not care to see anything or hear anything about the economic development or social life of the country.